New fiction

Easy as one, two, three

A family with funds falls apart

Other People's Money. By Justin Cartwright. Bloomsbury; 258 pages; £18.99. To be published in America in April; $15. Buy from Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com

VERY little literary fiction has been written about the financial crisis in Britain. And yet the City is of abiding interest. This is one reason why “Other People's Money”, Justin Cartwright's 15th novel, strikes the reader as both original and familiar.

Sir Harry Trevelyan-Tubal is a patriarch of a recognisable kind. Scion of an immigrant family from eastern Europe—“from Estonia to Etonia, as some wag put it”—he is the embodiment of the British establishment, the head of a successful private bank whose clients go back generations. Sir Harry is convalescing in the south of France after suffering a stroke. He appreciates that there should be an orderly succession at the family firm, but he can't bring himself to let go and issues daily instructions, which go unheeded, about how the bank should be run.

With his father out of the hot seat, Julian, Sir Harry's younger son, secretly “borrows” some money from the bank's pension fund as well as a family trust in Liechtenstein to try to right some losses. The funds will be repaid as soon as the bank is sold, so long as nobody finds out.

Inevitably, things start to go awry. Estelle, Sir Harry's nurse, knows how he was tricked into giving Julian power of attorney so he can effect the transfers. She has her eye on his priceless view of Collioure by Matisse. Sir Harry's much younger wife, Fleur, cannot stand his drooling and has her eye on her personal trainer. When a shut-up payment to Fleur's first husband goes astray the skeletons at Tubal & Co begin to rattle.

Mr Cartwright grew up in South Africa, but he has lived in London for many years. This gives him both insight and distance into how British imperial greed morphed seamlessly into simple greed. And though the Tubals' undoing is eventually engineered by an angry provincial journalist who hates the ruling classes, Mr Cartwright never writes simply to make a point. He has delivered a novel that is both funny and wise.